Fourteen Kills
by Estoma
Summary: Seneca Crane watches his favourite kills. Fifteen drabbles for the Caesar's Palace forum. Image by the lovely AprilLittle.
1. Fetish

**Author's note: Welcome to a new drabble series. 15 drabbles for the Vivid Challenge prompts at Caesar's Palace. **

**Fetish**_  
_

_a form of sexual desire in which gratification is linked to an abnormal degree to a particular object, item of clothing, part of the body, etc. (Oxford Dictionary)_

Screens take up three walls of the room, and the fourth wall is a thick curtain of red velvet to block out the window and the morning sun that threatens to pierce the room.

The bed sports covers of the same hue and the man on it is wearing a robe that matches. He dresses to match the room, just like a whore, but he's the one who pays, not the one who is paid for.

Seneca Crane reaches for the glass at his elbow.

"Take me through my favorite playlist," he says, and the screen hums into vivid life.


	2. Puncture

**Puncture**

Three neat puncture wounds grace the child's chest. They are over the heart, and one tine missed the nipple by barely an inch. Blood trickles slowly from them, drawn by gravity down the child's bare chest to moisten the ground.

Finnick Odair watches, the same way he would watch drops of water on a windowpane after it had been raining. It's his first kill with the trident.

It's already getting hard to remember that just a week ago, a trident was only a tool used to put food on the table. Now it will always be a weapon to him.


	3. Teeth

**Teeth**

Her attacker is stronger than her, and his body pins her to the ground as he straddles her. Their hands are locked together around the hilt of his knife. Enobaria tries to force it up, and the other tribute bears down on it, pushing towards her throat.

It's a desperate last chance when she jerks her head to the side and snaps at the soft skin of his exposed forearm. She doesn't even draw blood, but in the moment of surprise, she drives the knife up through her attacker's chin and his blood drenches her face and surprised open mouth.


	4. Blood

**Blood**

There are at least a dozen cuts on the girl's face and forearms. With the amount of blood, it looks like more. When she begs for it to stop, blood fills her mouth from the slice that runs across both her cheeks.

Heathcliffe drags her by the arm into the back room of the shattered cottage. The bloody knife he used on her is still in his hand. The jeers of the other careers follow him and they call him weak.

The look in the little girl's eyes tells him he is anything but weak. Heathcliffe makes one more cut.

* * *

**Author's note: Written at request of: ****Oxenstierna D. Yuki-Rin.**** Heathcliffe is ****Oxenstierna D. Yuki-Rin's**** OC. **


	5. Clawing

**Clawing**

Only two tributes survive the dam breaking. One boy clings to a shattered fir tree while the girl from District 4 rides the waves and when they cease, she goes hunting.

It takes eight hours of tireless strokes, navigating around smashed trees and floating bodies, to find the little boy, clawing his way up into the crown of the tree.

She pulls him out.

The final sounds heard in the arena are the soft lapping of water against wood, the desperate, choking, coughing breaths of the boy, and the girl's hysterical laughter as she treads water and watches him sink.

* * *

**Author's note: A chapter about Annie at Irma's suggestion. **


	6. Choking

**Choking**

Steam rises from the black mud in the marsh. Seen through this haze, everything takes on a surreal quality, from the tangled groundcover, to the two boys thrashing like fish in a net.

As the last two tributes left, they fight with only their bodies; their weapons were used up getting to this point. Black mud smears their skin and sweat makes them slick; it is difficult to get a purchase.

Though his hands are dark with mud, one tribute manages to grip the other's neck. He gains his purchase by the digging his thumbs deep into the boy's windpipe.

* * *

**Author's note: The killer is Fallon Lockyer (OC). To read a full story about him, please check out ****_Depraved and Devious._**


	7. Gouge

**Gouge **

She bears down on him with all the strength of eighteen well fed, well nourished years and at least eight years of training. Haymitch thinks it's the actually the food that counts the most now, because she overtops him by half a foot.

Weaponless, he tries to kick her off, but she's so damn strong. Then his desperate, fumbling fingers find her eye socket.

Haymitch digs his fingers in, feeling the bone of her skull. The girl's scream is almost enough to make him stop, but he doesn't, not until her eyeball dangles by a rope of pale, bloody nerve.


	8. Dismember

**Dismember**

In the 1st games, nobody knows exactly how things work. Taro Lockyer of District 2 is one of the first to figure it out.

Thirty seconds in, he stabs a boy in the chest.

He's rewarded with a silver parachute carrying a loaf of bread.

The next day, he slices his enemy's stomach open and then slits their throat. He gets two loaves of bread this time.

Later, a slash of his short sword leaves his opponent's arm hanging by a rope of sinew. Taro hacks the limb off and finishes the job.

He is delivered a roast dinner, still warm.

* * *

**Author's note: To read more about Taro and the first year of the games, check out ****_Depraved and Devious _**


	9. Organs

**Organs: **

A shiver follows where his fingers touch her. With the coolness of a blade they slide up her arm and trace the full curve of her breast. He circles her nipple until it stiffens.

"Don't touch me." Rin steps back.

"You want this," her district partner is quick to reply. He trails his cold fingers up the side of her jaw until she catches his wrist in a steely grasp.

"I really don't." Her cold blade doesn't caress his chest; it slides right in over his heart. Only when he's bleeding on the ground does she blow him a kiss.

* * *

**Credit goes to Oxenstierna D. Yuki-Rin for the tribute here. **


	10. Eyeball

**Eyeball**

The girl's scream is like nothing that has been heard in the arena before. When she falls into the pit of acid and her skin begins to burn, she screams like something inhuman.

A name is barely distinguishable; her district partner. He runs to her. Their hands meet for a heartbeat, before the acid reaches her fingers.

She keeps screaming as her fingers burn away to the bone, and the skin sloughs off her face.

For a moment, her eyeballs are left, staring out of her white skull. They can't show fear, blame, or hate, but they can show pain.

* * *

**Author's note: For more about these characters, please see ****_Depraved and Devious. _**


	11. Flesh

**Flesh**

Thirty seconds into the games, Brutus reaches the cornucopia. When the other careers curse and snarl, he bangs his fist against his chest and grins. The gleaming swords and spears are missing, and the axes, even the daggers. There isn't a single weapon.

There are only five kills in the bloodbath, and two of them are Brutus'. As the wrestling champion of the career academy, he is a flesh and blood weapon, and all he needs is a heavy rock snatched from the ground.

Both tributes' faces are a shattered mess; noses mashed into lips and bits of teeth everywhere.


	12. Rotting

**Rotting**

The wound is festering. Nerissa took a slice to the thigh in the bloodbath eight days ago. Now she's going to die.

She knows it, when the other careers leave to hunt and she waits behind. They say it's to guard the supplies.

Her district partner comes back early and alone, holding a mace in his hand and she swallows and tries to get up. Her leg can't support her weight.

"Help me up, would you?" she asks, wanting to pretend.

"Sure." Barra reaches down and clasps her hand, while with the other, he swings the mace against her skull.

* * *

**Author's note: These characters make a reappearance in ****_Depraved and Devious,_ though not their situation is a little different,****if you wanted to see them again.**


	13. Amputate

**Amputate**

Chaff makes it to the finale. And because fate has never been kind to him, he faces his district partner. It couldn't have been anyone else.

Two children who are used to cutting the stems of wheat try to cut the veins and arteries of their enemy.

But they're not enemies.

Cousins could never be enemies.

Chaff turns out to be better at cutting but his cousin does a good job too.

When he wakes up in a clean, white bed, Chaff sees that his left hand is gone. Of course, he's still got the hand that got him here.


	14. Monster

**Monster**

During the interviews, her claws are hidden beneath a manicure and her teeth masked behind a coat of lipstick. Her mentors tell her to keep her forked tongue out of sight and the stylist forces her cloven feet into a pair of red stilettos.

As the countdown reaches zero, and Cashmere makes her first kill, raking her nails down the boy's face, tearing his eye-socket, her disguise begins to crack.

When she leaves him bleeding and blinded, and returns with a knife no longer than her thumb, the audience wonders how her blonde curls and wide eyes ever fooled them.


	15. Cannibal

**Cannibal**

The snowy slope materializes on the screen and the avalanche rumbles through the surround sound. Crane's face pales.

"No," he snaps, "no, not this one!"

Quickly, the screen goes blank and Crane shivers, pressing one of the red, silk pillows to his chest. He closes his eyes.

It's not the boy disappearing under the snow that he fears; it's the remembered knock at the door and the peacekeepers who stood there. They came to reprimand his father, the head gamemaker, for allowing a cannibal in the arena.

The reprimand echoed around the foyer even after the body was taken away.

**Author's note: Last chapter. Do not fret though; I have several other drabble series.**


End file.
